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The SEC is apparently gearing a fraud case against credit rating agencies like Standard & Poor's and Moody's for their role in the financial crisis.

The SEC may file civil charges against ratings agencies for their role in the financial crisis.

SEC officials are looking into whether the ratings agencies committed fraud by failing to do enough research to rate adequately the pools of subprime mortgages and other loans, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

Does anyone really think this will mean anything for investors? Not if they've seen what the SEC and other regulators have accomplished (or haven't accomplished) before and after the 2008 financial crisis.

Here's how this will play out: The SEC will file civil charges against the credit agencies for inflating their ratings on firms and products that they knew were doomed. The firms will deny, deny deny and say the SEC has it wrong and that their jobs are simply to come up with a rating based on the information provided to them by the companies. The SEC will disclose all the evidence it's gathered to show just how unlawfully the agencies behaved.

Maybe the SEC will mention the time back in August 2008 the then CEO of AIG paid a visit to JPMorgan Chase's Jamie Dimon and told him that the credit ratings agencies promised him they’d wait a month before downgrading his insurance firm. That happened less than 3 weeks before the firm's liquidity crisis blew up in its face and needed an $85 billion bailout from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

In the end, the ratings agencies will settle for an insignificant amount of money (compared to the havoc their faulty ratings caused) and will neither admit or deny wrong doing. And who knows? Maybe a few years from now when the next financial crisis hits the agencies will be facing similar charges for their role in it once again.

No SEC inquiry or settlement in the world will change a firm's bad behavior. The real way to address the problem with credit rating agencies is to change the way they are paid.